Note-taking is a common task in work and study environments. People jot down ideas on scraps of paper to make sure they are not forgotten. They annotate printouts of documents during meetings, and they write on presentation printouts during classes.
A similar paradigm has made its way into electronic media, wherein computer users annotate and comment on electronic documents and presentations that they view on screen. These annotations may be recorded electronically typically using annotation tools that are offered as part of some specific software applications, such as word processors, or using a separate document-editing application, such as an on-screen notepad or other text editor. (Of course, people still write notes on paper, as well, while viewing electronic documents and presentations.) When users are simultaneously faced with a variety of screens and documents, the task of taking notes and keeping track of them can become unwieldy. The user must often invest considerable effort downstream in organizing the notes into a useful form.
There are methods known in the art for organizing electronic annotations. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,146,552, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes a method for associating annotations with electronically-published material. This method permits a reader of an electronic document to create notes, bookmarks and annotations, and to relate them to a particular location in the document. The record of the annotations can be stored within or separately from the document. When stored separately, the annotations are held in a file that is associated by name with the document and can either be accessed by a particular individual reader or shared between different readers. The annotations can be associated with a particular context within the document by exploiting the structure created by the writer of the document. This structure identifies major document elements, such as chapters, sections, sub-sections, paragraphs, figures, etc.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,822,539, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes a system for adding cross-references to a document using an annotation proxy and annotation server. The annotation proxy is a software procedure configured to merge a requested document from a first server with hypertext links to documents containing associated supplemental information. The annotation proxy can generate a dictionary of references to documents requested by a user. Each reference in the dictionary indicates the textual context of the hypertext link or links used to request the associated document.